In 2012 we were engaged by Maxis to re-design their flagship store at KLCC in the world famous Petronas Towers.
This venue represents a great opportunity for the brand to make a statement on the truly global stage of one of the world’s premier shopping locations.
We were asked to create a customer experience that brought to life the newly re-positioned Maxis brand with the proposition of ‘Humanising Technology’.
Turning a hard, corporate service centre into a soft, human retail experience through design is one thing. Instilling a retail culture into a service led organisation is something else altogether. New roles, integrating departments and a new customer focus have all been essential in creating the new 10,000 sq ft Maxis flagship store experience.
We are now rolling out this design across Maxis’ 300 strong national retail network.

People join gyms because they want to achieve something, to get fit, to loose weight or to meet someone. Once they have achieved that goal, they typically leave. This leads to gym’s manufacturing loyalty by locking their members into contracts.
Virgin Active operates in most continents around the Globe. They have identified a huge opportunity in the Australian market due to the brand’s ability to create a loyal following.
The role of the Virgin Active brand is to forge relationships with customers as they join while they are in need of support and encouragement. Once this relationship is formed, the brand then has permission to encourage and push its members to the next level so that once they have reached their goal, they are encouraged to stay to reach a new goal.
We have now opened four Virgin Active gyms across Australia, all are full to capacity with a significantly more loyal membership than the competition.

“ Virgin Active Australia would be happy to suggest Public Design Group to any company seeking to bring their Brand to life in the physical space.”
Anton Brown – Marketing Manager – Virgin Active

Stone was created to address the opportunity in the market for a real estate brand to offer expert property investment advice. Mainstream REA’s have fallen short with this idea to date because they struggle to create the level trust required for what is essentially a very different type of purchase.

Buying, selling and renting property are part of every day life. Investing in property as part of a wealth management strategy is a very specialist activity that most of us are only comfortable talking about with people we trust. And here in lies the challenge, who trusts a real estate agent?

Founder of Stone Real Estate Peter Mumford, approached us to create a customer experience that was so good, it naturally helped agents garner the trust required to turn an every day conversation into a very personal one. This meant creating an environment that not only looked different from the mainstream players but also behaved differently.

Designing an experience that builds trust requires an in depth understanding of how people think and feel about corporate brands. In a world where most service retailers still push their logo and corporate colours to bursting point, we look more closely at how the brand can meet the rational and emotional needs associated with the different levels of conversation that need to take place.

Stone Real Estate is nurturing a rapidly growing audience within each community it operates, by holding a myriad of investor related after hours events and seminars in its stores. (http://www.stonerealestate.com.au/events/)

This activity is a key strategy in building genuine interest and loyalty from local people considering property investment. The events are held in the same space that customers use during the day, further exposing the brand as a credible new entrant to the real estate market with a significant value added difference.

Retail in Australia is undergoing voracious transformation. Driven by cutting
edge technology, global competition and higher customer expectation,
the time to sit still has run out.
The bar has been irreversibly raised by the arrival of world-class international
retail brands such as Apple and H&M. There needs to be a new approach to
designing retail experience as we are now competing on the global stage
with retailers who think nothing of opening stores on 5th Avenue.
Welcome to Retail Lab, the most technologically advanced retail test facility in Asia
COMPETITION: KNOWLEDGE ADVANTAGE First mover is only an advantage if you know you’re moving in the right
direction. The new world of retail demands thinking beyond theory,
to a place where we seek knowledge and deliver answers.
Retail Lab creates autonomous research environments specific to your needs.
Confidently testing prototypes in real time with an immediately adaptable
environment accelerates time to market with effective design
EXPERIENCE: THE NEW RETAIL ECONOMY Constant connectivity is dramatically reshaping customer experience
in retail today with personalised digital shopping advancing exponentially.
Seamless and personalised experiences now happen across every channel
whilst retailers accumulate invaluable shopper insights enabling them
to further refine their offer.
TECHNOLOGY: CONSTANTLY CONNECTED HUMANS Understanding the potential of new technology to positively influence
customer behaviour is critical to successful omni-channel retailing.
The efficacy of new technology can be proven before going to market:
Retail Lab measures how shoppers react to the future of technologically
|enabled browsing, comparing, selecting, paying, providing feedback,
demonstrating product and staff interaction.
The future of retail requires a new, agile way of thinking where idea
generation and realisation are live, dynamic and fully integrated.

Singtel, Singapore’s largest retailer has been a client of ours since 2009.

In 2015 they changed their corporate identity for the first time in sixteen years.

The new brand positioning is a deliberate move to be perceived more as a service brand rather than a technology provider. The reason for this is all about the new market opportunity.

Telco has traditionally derived revenue from selling devices and data. In the new market, that will only represent 1/3rd of revenue, the rest will come from managed services and device management – or as the category is now being coined Information Communication Technology. It’s now less about the devices and more about what they can do for my life.

Following the success of the existing retail network in establishing Singtel as a market leading content player, Singtel approached us again last year. This time our challenge would be more complex; How to create a customer experience that gives customers the confidence that Singtel understands more about the way we live and therefore what we desire in our digital lives. The first thing you notice about the new Singtel Shop is that it’s not about tech, it’s about humans. The environment draws on natural materials such as grass, rock and timber to put the tech into the context of our real lives.

We have now rolled this concept out to 4 new sites, all of which are enjoying an increase in high value transactions associated with the new world of ICT.

As a challenger bank, BOQ understand the opportunity in the market to be un-bank like. To the point where the CEO told us “If it looks anything like a bank, you’ve failed!” The reason is simple. With BOQ’s owner manager model, they have a unique ability to deliver a higher level of personal service to their customers.
Welcome to Australia’s first customer centric bank, designed with the customer front of mind.
Our strategy was simple. Customers considering high value purchases need high value conversations.
We looked at where people hang out and talk, places like the kitchen table and the local café. Allowing customers to be side by side with staff and giving them the choice of where and how they are served has allowed us to reflect these naturally conversational places.
High value transactions in any service retail sector typically involve a more complex set of emotional needs for the customer that, if responded to well, can lead to higher value sales and increased loyalty.
So why not have your loan written whilst you sit on a leather Liberty chair enjoying a view of the ocean? – Surely that’s how customers would choose to do it if they had the choice…. Now they can, and they do.
In fact the increase in high value purchases from this branch have outstripped the brand’s flagship branch on Queen St Brisbane. More significantly, for a bank entering states where it has negligible brand awareness, the fact that 75% of these high value transactions are coming from people who have never banked with BOQ before is a testament to the power of good design in effecting the bottom line.

We have now repositioned all three of Luxottica's retail optometrist brands, OPSM, Laubman &amp; Pank and Budget Eyewear. This has included new store environments, new brand identities and new big ideas for all three.

OPSM is the original and largest of their brands. We developed its big idea with BMF, their ad agency, who have now created the first series of highly successful TVC's around it. OPSM has a wonderfully emotive big idea, 'The feeling of new eyewear'. Since opening it's first new store at Warringah Mall in 2006, 49 new format OPSM stores have been built across Australia with the intention to open a further 80 by 2010. On average, the stores are sustaining a revenue increase of 30%.

Being a new entrant into an already crowded market of highly established brands is extremely difficult. Samsung have some great products in this category but don’t come near consideration up against category killers like SONOS or specialists like Bose. Samsung needed to create credibility by making a statement that assumed ownership of the sound category. It is less about their product and more about the subject – or in the case of ‘Amplify The Moment’, the benefit.

Injecting life and energy into a major banks branch communications has been great fun. When you think about it from the customer’s point of view, a bank actually has a lot more to say than they think. And by that, we don’t mean product advertising, we mean environmental graphics and messaging that gets the customer to consider themselves in the context of their bank.

We helped NAB understand the difference between signage that fulfilled a rational customer need and graphics & messaging that appealed to their emotional needs. Once this hierarchy was established, the execution became intuitive.

Airtel is undergoing a major re-positioning towards the youth market, a significant move for a brand with such a broad reach (Airtel operates in 20 countries with over 250m customers). We were approached to create a new dynamic customer experience by transforming their network of service centres into branded retail outlets. There are three new store models from flagship to corporate to dealer outlet, all of which deliver their own interpretation of the new brand experience to their respective audience.
Live devices take centre stage, flanked by more in-depth category demonstrations on the walls. The retail zone of the store allows staff to demonstrate and sell the core product of mobile data (network usage) whilst the quieter service zone caters for customer support.
Quite literally blue sky thinking.

As part of Luxottica’s acquisition of the OPSM Group in Australia, Laubman & Pank was to be positioned as the ‘Top end’ optometrist, targeting the affluent, university educated independent customer.
We had a better thought - how about giving this brand an emotive idea, allowing it to segment the market with broader reach? ‘The Eye People’ idea appealed to people who are concerned about their eyes, not just those with big pockets. The smartest thing about this idea is that it engages the optometrists by making their skills central to the proposition.
Both segments are looking for a higher level of service experience and often value the face-to-face element of the experience more than product choice.
With this in mind, we created an environment that responded to both audience needs. Firstly the environment took on a less retail, more service look and feel with the waiting area being promoted to a central, more important location. The communications in this area focused on the brands expertise in eye health throughout every life stage rather than the typical aspirational eyewear models seen in most other optometry stores. This part of the environment answered the need for the reassurance that people have when looking for eye health expertise.

Telco retailing is changing quickly. Research shows that the more services we have with our network, the less likely we are to leave. This means that as the broadband market matures and the opportunity to poach competitors' customers diminishes, the networks will become increasingly desperate to lock us into more than one service.

This store has been designed to increase the value of existing customers. The result is a store in which we can, for the first time, easily understand the benefits of converging technology and how to buy it.

Toyota approached us to design a showroom stand to launch their global racing brand TRD here in Australia. The first initiative was the supercharged Aurion 3500S, the fastest car Toyota has ever sold here.

Most clients are enthusiastic about their product or business opportunity when they come to see us. Toyota however, were rather more than that. "The car is a blend of supercharged front wheel drive performance and

sophisticated styling, creating a new category that sits deliberately apart

They even took us to Melbourne to their top-secret design lab where we met Nick Hogios, the cars designer in full swing. So we needed to design a stand that stood for speed (not power) and sophisticated style.

The paint market in Australia caters predominantly to the Trade market and Inspirations Paint was no exception. There is however, a big opportunity to address the needs of the DIY customer in this category.
For the DIY customer, it’s not about buying paint, it’s about creating a look which they often lack confidence in achieving. The central idea for the store is to elevate the importance of the customers’ project by creating a consultancy style ‘Project Workshop’ to develop style, design and colour solutions. The workshop environment brings customers together with consultants, surrounding them with everything they need from magazines to colour chips to ‘on the spot’ painted samples.
The brand was officially re-launched in March 2013, we are currently forty stores through the 104 store network across Australia.

Barbeques Galore Staff are no longer asking, 'how much do you want to spend?'

Research showed that only 1 in 5 Australians were barbequing properly, by using the lid. However, if you look over the ocean to our American friends, they all use a lid (because apparently they know what they're doing!). So it was our job to tell Australians how to barbeque properly.

We repositioned the brand with the big idea of 'Knowing how to get the best out of your barbeque'. This has allowed store staff to stop asking how much we want to spend and to start asking how we like to barbeque - the emotive bit. The store environment supports this thinking with a graphic system that offers hints and tips on better barbequing and illustrates the features and benefits of the machines.

Jason Pollard

Founder

Good design affects every aspect of a brand, from customer experience, to business performance, to internal culture. Our work penetrates far beyond the walls of the store, ensuring integrity in the delivery of an idea.

I started working with FutureBrand London in 1996 and came to Sydney to launch their retail studio in 2002 with Dan. We started Public in 2003.

Dan Cooper

Founder

Over the last 20 years I’ve worked with many respected individuals in the design industry in Australia and the UK.

I’ve learnt it’s the simple, commercially minded ideas that focus on customer needs, that deliver the most successful customer experiences.

Hopefully our work speaks for itself.

James Hewitt

Creative Partner

I’ve worked in brand design agencies around the world for over 20 years on a diverse range of clients and projects.

Every project has it’s own unique challenges of brand and audience. Creating the meaningful connections between them is what continually takes us to new and exciting places.